Daily Charlotte Observer 1893
30 Apr 1893
"One of the most remarkable men, in my judgment," said John R. Morris, at the
Central Hotel the other day, "that the State has ever produced, was Buck
Hearne. He was reared in Pitt County and was a mill wright. When young he
entered the army, and after the war blossomed out as an editor - at Wilson,
Raleigh and Goldsboro. Nobody ever caught him reading a book, and yet he was
full of knowledge of every kind.
"While he was the editor of the daily paper at Goldsboro, I was a kid and
devil in the printing office. He never wrote an editorial until the last
minute and many a time I have had to go to his room, wake him up and ask him
for his copy. He would call for his pad, prop himself up on his pillows, make
me sit down, and as fast as he could run his hand across the paper would throw
off his stuff. But every thought in it was prefectly digested and every
sentence was fit to go into a book.
"He was a wonderful writer, wonderful in his readiness and power. I have known
him to get up in the middle of the afternoon, eat his dinner, then walk the
pavement, up and down, in front of the hotel, pulling his moustache in that
peculiar way of his, until night, and never speak to anybody. He was thinking
then, and it was this thinking that enabled him to turn off those powerful
editorials at a moment's notice - they were all thought out and there was
nothing for him to do but to put them on paper.
"He wouldn't work. He would go to the office late at night, turn off his
editorial, read the proof of it, and run over the exchanges - he could suck
any paper dry in two minutes and that was the end of it. He was an editorial
writer - that was all. He had an infirmity" said Morris, "but I always bowed
to his genius."